>>5306157In one, your swarm is a dark cloud, ravenous and insatiable as you walk across a land stripped of life, every square foot of the fleshscape crawling with a hundred million locust-like swarmlings, purifying everything they consume as you charge westward, unstoppable. Innumerable. You and yours are a final plague let loose on this hell, a hell all your own as your endless swarm strips flesh from bone, bone from marrow, and life from earth.
In the other, she's there with you. The one that lurks behind your eyes, the one that has been with you. Your other half. The Queen.
Sam, before you knew she was there.
A great and terrible beast, dwarfing behemoths, leviathans, thunderbirds-
even back then, did you know? -all, a single swarmling crawling across mountains, wingbeats tearing the fleshscape asunder. The wind is at your back, and it is just you and the only one you can rely on. Your Queen, yes...but you yourself are the one to whom she answers.
And, in the very center, the worst of all. The thing that masked itself as a kindness, the thing that wormed its way into the heads of the ones you held dear, prying secrets like diamonds from their deepest places. It did not ask permission, and it granted no privacy. It promised to make you closer, to weave hearts and minds together in a web of emotion and thought until, at last, you sat at the center of a kingdom of bowed heads, inextricably linked to your own.
Which will you choose?
How will the world end?
It's a simple question.
One that decides how you change.
How they change.
A classic conundrum.
Quantity, or quality?
Choice, or control?
YOU CONTROL THE END, the voice howled in your ears.
(You Continued)
(You Always Continue)
And so, you took that control, and forced open a new path. Between quantity and quality, you chose neither, and were given something wholly, utterly new. When that began to rot on the vine of Mother’s spite, you tore the festering thing out by the root. You threw it away, and in doing so garnered the curiosity of a dying god.
And though it all, through every choice and every consequence, you spared not a thought for yourself. A candle burning at both ends, until you were almost reduced to ash and embers. But you…
You are loved.
Your friends, family, and girlfriend watched as you tore yourself apart to save the world and them, when it was never your burden to bear alone. Fragments of a past that was never truly yours have come to stand beside you, in their own ways, both of them echoing the quiet, steadfast request of your family.
To be good to yourself, and give yourself the same grace and kindness that you show them and everyone else you’ve met in the Crucible.
You think, just maybe…
…you will.
TRYPOPHILIC HIVE — LEVEL UP
(Continued)
